Tala Madani Featured in Hammer Museum Exhibition

Tala Madani Featured in Hammer Museum Exhibition

Tala Madani, Spring 2013 International Artist-in-Residence, is one of 35 Los Angeles based artists featured in the Hammer Museum’s MADE IN L.A. exhibition, on view until September 7, 2014. Madani’s stop-motion animations in the exhibition document the grotesque adventures of an overweight man who oozes dripping trails of paint. Although the videos are short, the process of making these humorous animations is labor-intensive, with each of the stop-motion animations requiring roughly 2,500 paintings to come to life. According to Madani, the humor and motion in her videos are meant to supplement language. Fluent in both Farsi and English, Madani understands the hierarchy of power associated with written language and therefore chooses to communicate solely through the human figure. While these stop-motion videos were created specifically for the MADE IN L.A exhibition, the themes addressed by the artist connect to her recent work at Artpace, where Madani painted pieces dealing with similar motifs of gender, taboo, absurdity and the grotesque. Read more about Madani’s MADE IN L.A. exhibition here and see Artpace interviews with Tala Madani here.